Chapter 6:Popular Religion in the Nineteenth Century

AS WE HAVE SEEN, the nineteenth century was a great age of
religion.While the elite in Europe
and the United States experienced the death of God as their spiritual needs fell
away from the gospel of Jesus Christ, ordinary people in America flocked to
churches and responded in their millions to the preaching of modern prophets.

But hasnt the modern industrial era drawn people away
from religion, as the proofs of science and the deliberations of German
philology invalidated the transcendental claims of the scriptures?That is certainly the received wisdom.Back in the old days, everybody believed in the dogmas of religion as a
matter of course.As the
Enlightenment shone the light of reason into mens lives they abandoned the
superstitions of a pre-scientific age and came to put their trust in reason,
science, and democracy rather than God, faith, and priests.

But in America religious observance and adherence has
increased since the Enlightenment, not decreased.Contrary to received wisdom, the Revolutionary Americans were
not all dour Puritans and dutiful churchgoers.In 1776, only 17 percent of colonial North Americans were religious
adherents.But by 1850 the rate had
doubled to 35 percent, and by 1890 it had increased further to 45 percent. (Finke
1992 p16)It was a remarkable
transformation.Over the seventy
five years from 1776 to 1850, when the population of the United States increased
from 3.9 million to 23.2 million, the proportion of people who belonged to a
church climbed from one in six to one in three, in other words from 660,000
members to 8,100,000.At exactly
the period that the educated elites were reading the German philologists and
beginning to experience the Death of God, churchgoing and religious belief began
to climb sharply among the ordinary American people, both in relative and in
absolute terms.By the end of the
century, in 1890, the proportion of Americans who were religious adherents had
increased by over two and a half times.In
terms of actual church members, the numbers had increased from 660,000 to 28
million in a little over a hundred years.

This growth in religious adherence was not exactly
spontaneous.It was, as Rodney
Stark was written, a supply-side phenomenon driven by religious
entrepreneurs.The First Great
Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century may have been a startup venture that
mainly relied on the skills and the charisma of George Whitefield and the Wesley
brothers, but the Second Great Awakening from 1800 to 1830 was run on
established principles and written manuals of best practice.In the early nineteenth century the United States was no longer the
close-knit community of the colonial era, and the revival movement split into
three major parts.In New England,
the leading revivalists like Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher were concerned
about the emotional expression of religious feeling, both because they wanted to
ensure that their converts were not just swept up in the excitement of the
moment, and because they feared the power of the Unitarians, upscale believers
centered around Harvard and Boston, to marginalize their movement.Theirmovement eschewed
excessive emotion and required converts to demonstrate that their conversion
experience had taken before accepting them into a regular church
community.The Midwest, however,
was far removed from the beetling brows of Harvard Square, and Charles Grandison
Finney observed of its inhabitants that there are so many things to lead
their minds off religion that it was necessary to raise an excitement
to get peoples attention. (McLoughlin
1978 p126)In New England and the
Midwest, political reform and anti-slavery formed a significant part of the
revival message.In the South,
anti-slavery would not sell.Revivalists
like Peter Cartwright kept out of politics.Southerners did not believe that religion should extend beyond converting
people to the basic moral pattern of rural middle-class virtue. (McLoughlin
1978 p137)

But whatever the political dimension of the Second Great
Awakening, its religious core was the same in North and South.The Calvinist doctrine of predestination was abandoned.People were in control of their own salvation.All they had to do was repent and accept Jesus Christ and they would be
saved.And though the Calvinist
rigidity had been abandoned, the basic program was still the same: escape from
the meaninglessness of a life of pleasure to a life of meaning as a soldier in
Christs army of middle-class purpose and discipline.

The most important institution driving the increase in
religious observance was Methodism.Starting
from zero in 1750, Methodism grew rapidly in Britain and in the United States.By the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Methodists represented 2.5
percent of religious adherents, but had exploded to 34 percent by 1850.Meanwhile the old Puritan churches declined from 15-20
percent of adherents to 3-4 percent. (Finke
1992 p55)The Baptists increased
their share of adherents from 17 percent to 20 percent.

As the numbers show, these new churches were not just
grabbing members from the older churches, obtaining a bigger slice of a fixed
pie, but represented instead a genuine growth in religious adherence.The old churches maintained their memberships, so the growth in the ranks
of Methodists and Baptists had to come from recruitment from unchurched
Americans, from the new immigrants from Europe, and from the pioneers on the
frontier.By the end of the
century, in 1890, the Methodists had lost some market share, declining slightly
from 117 adherents per 1,000 population, while the Baptists had increased market
share from 80 to 94 adherents per 1,000 population.Meanwhile, the total US population had increased from 23 million to 63
million.

The United States began the nineteenth century as an
overwhelmingly Protestant country.As
the century progressed, however, a trickle of Catholics began to cross the
Atlantic, swelling to a tidal wave as the potato blight sent millions of Irish
to North America.In the latter
half of the nineteenth century Catholics from other nations, notably Italy,
joined the flood.But the Catholic
Church in America could not just re-enroll its-co-religionists from the old
country.The immigrants were just
as unchurched as the revolutionary generation of 1776.In the mid-century, the Irish seemed a lost community, mired in
poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence,
criminality, and illegitimacy.(Stern
1997)Yet by the end of the
century: the sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of
illiterates had become the citys schoolteachers; those who had been the
outcasts of society now ran its political machinery, and the educated elites
had begun to complain about the Puritanism of the Irish.The Italians were just as bad.Archbishop
Corrigan of New York in 1888 noted that of 80,000 Italian immigrants in the
city, barely 2 percent went to church.The
Irish clergy were uncertain how to communicate their problem to the pope in
Rome, for they found the Italians ignorant of religion and immured in a depth
of vice little known to us yet. (Finke
1992 p116)In Chicago, the clergy
found the Italians of southern Italy and Sicily unexcelled in their ignorance
of religion.But the Irish
hierarchy was not discouraged.Under
their leadership the Catholics managed an explosive growth, from 1 million
adherents in 1850 to 7.3 million in 1880.The
architect of this remarkable achievement was John Hughes, born in 1797 the son
of a poor farmer from County Tyrone in Ireland.His story was told by William J. Stern in How Dagger John Saved New
Yorks Irish in City Journal in 1997.

John Hughes came to America in 1817, and went to work as
a gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Marys College and seminary in
Emmitsburg, Maryland.Working there
rekindled in him a childhood dream of becoming a priest, but the head of the
seminary refused the gardeners request to enroll and study for the
priesthood.Fortunately he
impressed Mother Elizabeth Bayley Setoncanonized later as Americas first
native-born saintand she interceded with Mount St. Marys.Hughes was ordained a priest in 1826 and moved to Philadelphia.Immediately he began to battle anti-Catholic bigotry.

Between 1820 and 1830, immigration had swelled the
U.S. Catholic population 60 percent to 600,000, with no end in sight.The new immigrants were mostly Irishimpoverished, ignorant, unskilled
country folk, with nothing in their experience to prepare them for success in
the urban environs to which they were flocking.Hughes believed that the relentless barrage of anti-Catholic prejudice
that greeted them in their new land was demoralizing the already disadvantaged
immigrants and holding back their progress. (Stern
1997)

Hughes
was determined to fight the nativists that oppressed the Catholic immigrants and
began a spirited campaign against the bigotry under which the Catholics
suffered.When a cholera epidemic
hit Philadelphia in 1834, the Protestant nativists were quick to blame the
Catholic immigrants.But Hughes
worked tirelessly among the sick and dying and acidly noted how many
Protestant ministers had fled the city while he and the Catholic Sisters of
Charity... had cared for the cholera victims without regard for their own
safety.In 1838, Hughes was made
bishop in New York, a care of 60,000 Catholic souls in a city of 300,000.He immediately set about improving educational opportunities
for New Yorks Catholics (Stern
1997).

In 1838, as now, the public schools were a political
catspaw with which powerful interests tried to injure their political enemies.The New York Public School Society, with the help of state funding, was a
Protestant organization that taught Protestantism in the schools using the
Protestant Bible.Hughes (with
the support of New Yorks 12,000 Jews) wanted an end to such sectarian
education, and he wanted, above all, state aid for Catholic schools, just as the
state had funded denominational schools before 1826 (with no one dreaming of
calling such aid unconstitutional).But
the Protestants preferred a policy of no state aid for denominational schools
rather than allow any money to go to Catholic schools, and passed the Maclay
Bill of 1842 [that] banned all religious instruction from public schools and
provided no state money to denominational schools. (Stern
1997)

After this defeat, Hughes threw himself into building up
the Catholic schools without help from the state.We shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church
afterward, he said expressing a sentiment that has inspired the Catholic
Church in the United States ever since.By
his death, the New York diocese boasted over 100 schools.It needed them.In 1845 the Irish potato crop failed, and between 1845 and
1860, over two million Irish crossed the Atlantic on the so-called coffin
ships, suffering a mortality rate greater than African slaves endured on the
Middle Passage. (Stern 1997)

Arriving in the United States, the Irish found that
their problems had just begun.Those
who had means moved into the interior.On
the other hand, the destitute, the disabled, the broken down, the very young,
the very old [stayed in New York.They
were] the scattered debris of the Irish nation.The contemporary descriptions of the Irish in New York City are familiar
to the modern ear.Family life had disintegrated; alcoholism and drugs were
epidemic.Gangs roamed the streets,
fighting one another and the nativists, but mostly preying on their fellow
Irish, robbing houses and businesses in their neighborhoods.In 1850, an estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, the nymphs of the
pave worked the streets.It was
up to Hughes to do something about it.He
decided to use the scattered debris as brick to build the Catholic Church.(Stern 1997)

Buying up abandoned Protestant churches in Irish wards, he
taught the Irish a religion of personal responsibility, stressing confession to
people who had often never received any religious education.Self-control and high personal standards were the key... Certain
conduct was right, and other conduct was wrong.People must not govern their lives according to momentary feelings or the
desire for instant gratification: they had to live up to a code of behavior that
had been developed over thousands of years.But this was not a pinched and gloomy affair.Hughes taught that if you keep the commandments, God will be your
protector, healer, advisor, and perfect personal friend. (Stern
1997)It was the same message that
Protestant revivalists had been communicating to unchurched Americans.

Hughes also had a message for women, with the cult of the
Virgin Mary directed at Catholic women, who outnumbered men by up to 20 percent
in mid-century.Mary was Queen
of Peace, Queen of Prophets, and Queen of Heaven.Hughes inspired Catholic women to take control of their
lives, inspire their families and become a force for good.By the 1850s, they began to be major forces for moral
rectitude, stability, and progress in Irish neighborhoods of the city.And the nuns, managing hospitals, schools, orphanages, and church
societies demonstrated what women could aspire to.(Stern 1997)

By the 1890s, the Irish represented only 10 percent of
arrests for violent crimes, down from 60 percent.Three-quarters of the police force was Irish. And
almost a third of the citys teachers were Irish women. These lace-curtain
Irish were often mocked by the press for their puritanical attitudes, but
in the 1860s all this was in the future, so when he died shortly after the draft
riots of 1863, Archbishop Hughes had felt he had been a failure.(Stern 1997)

Why did the ranks of Methodists and Baptists and American
Catholics increase so rapidly?And
why did the old Puritan churchesthe Congregationalists and the
Presbyteriansand the Anglican Church not grow?Why did the proportion of churched Americans increase from 17 percent in
1776 to 35 percent in 1850 and to 45 percent in 1890?The study of social institutions is the province of sociology, and among
sociologists of religion nobody has produced more provocative work than Rodney
Stark and his collaborators.In a
number of books he has developed a sociology of religion rather different than
the secular assumptions of those in his profession that have expected the end of
religion for most of the one hundred years since its founding by Karl Marx,
Auguste Comte, and Max Weber.

In Starks system, religious movements begin as a sect or
cult.A sect in his definition is a
breakaway group, splitting away from an existing church, usually because its
leader and its members find the church grown too secular and too comfortable
with a sinful world.Sects always
keep a distance between themselves and the surrounding community, and the
surrounding community usually returns the compliment.Sects are in tension with the surrounding culture; they
define themselves and preserve their community by sharpening this tension.The disciplined life of the sect, the abstention from social diversion
such as drinking and dancing, propels the members into modest prosperity.Their tension with the surrounding society starts to ease; they begin the
process of secularization that converts their high-tension movement into a
church, a religious institution with low tension between its members and the
society at large.

Methodism began as a sect, an attempt to purify the Church
of England.It began in the North
American colonies in the Great Awakening with the revivalist campaign of George
Whitefield.But the Great Awakening
was no spontaneous event.It was
planned.Whitefield was a master
of advance publicity who sent out a constant stream of press releases, extolling
the success of his revivals... to the cities he intended to visit.Benjamin Franklin published many of Whitefields sermons and derived a
significant income from them. (Finke
1992 p88)But Methodist revivalism
did not die out with Whitefield.It
became a principal method of Methodist recruitment for the next century.It was refined by Charles Grandison Finney and others so that
the Methodists soon had a manual of revivalism that specified exactly how
revivals were to be run, for how many days, how camp meetings should be set out,
and how the preaching should be scheduled.In 1866, C. C. Goss set out the Methodist recipe for success.A Methodist [preacher] addresses himself directly to the heart...[He] comes directly from the people...The sermons have been delivered in plain, simple language.(Finke 1992 p105)The Methodists preachers were not settled, but itinerant,
circuit-riders riding from one community to another.As they have no certain dwelling-place, they are rightfully called
itinerants.Methodist preachers
were paid much less that the educated, middle-class ministers of the
better-established Puritan churches.The new style of preaching spoke to the people.According to revivalist Barton Stone,

when we began first to preach these things, the
people appeared as awakening from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the
first time that they were responsible beings, and that a refusal to use the
means appointed was a damning sin. (Finke
1992 p99)

Faced with an ignorant, unchurched multitude in the second
half of the nineteenth century, the Irish Catholics in the United States used
the same tools of recruitment as the Protestants.And their remarkable achievement was to church the nominally
Catholic immigrants from all across Europe with an overwhelmingly Irish
hierarchy.Appealing to a broad
spectrum of ethnic background in many cases they provided vernacular services to
the newly arrived.In 1916, for
instance, a religious census found that about half of Catholics attended
services where a language other than English was spoken in the sermon.The Irish Catholics who ran the church were acutely sensitive to the need
to present the church in a comforting way to the immigrants and meet their need
for connection with their native culture.And
they also managed to persuade the European immigrants to support their churches
with substantial tithes.Max Weber
was shocked to find German immigrant lumberjacks contributing $80 per year out
of a $1,000 annual income to the church. (Finke
1992 p115)

Of course, the Catholics didnt call their revivals
revivals, and they didnt call their evangelists evangelists.Revivals were called parish missions and they were scheduled about
as frequently as in the enthusiastic Protestant churches.Parish missions were planned months in advance, used traveling preachers
who specialized in revivals, and used the same emotional appeal as Protestants.They used a good cop/bad cop routine.The traveling preacher could say things that the local priest was too
nice to say: that everyone would go to hell unless they went to confession and
told the truth for a change. (Finke
1992 p122)The noted Jesuit
revivalist Francis X. Weniger traveled over 200,000 miles to preach at more than
eight hundred Catholic parish missions.

One of those affected by the religious best
practices of the Second Great Awakening was a young boy growing up in the
village of Palmyra, New York, along the route of the Erie Canal, and right in
the center of the Burned-over District, the region of New York State that
responded again and again to the revivals of the eras religious
entrepreneurs.The Smith family was
"by all accounts, a close and loving family, greatly given to religious
discussion and experimentation. (Stark
2004 p100) Distressed by his sense of sinfulness and unworthiness, 14 year-old
Joseph Smith experienced one day a vision while praying in a field.He related his vision to his family, and they encouraged him.The support of his family and subsequent visions led him to found the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saintsthe Mormonsthat, after intense
episodes of persecution, found a permanent home in Utah.The Mormons started off as a sect, in the sense defined by Rodney Stark.They kept themselves separate from society and were persecuted for their
difference.In their beliefs, the
Mormons followed the relaxation of the strict Calvinist doctrine of
predestination that characterized the Second Great Awakening.Believers were not just helpless before the divine and cast into hell if
they werent picked as one of the elect; they could work out their salvation
themselves.The Latter-day Saints
developed a three-tier doctrine of salvation.Christian believers went to the highest celestial kingdom of Heaven.But people of good will who did not accept the gospel went to the
terrestrial kingdom, and even the wicked got to go to a low level
telestial kingdom of heaven.On
top of that, using the doctrine of baptism for the dead, Mormons were able to
redeem those who had died without accepting the gospel.The church is organized hierarchically into wards and stakes, with 200 to
800 members per ward, and up to ten wards in a stake.However each ward is run by an unpaid bishop appointed from the
membership to a term of three to four years, and each stake is run by an unpaid
president who serves a similar term.Thus
all members are expected to shoulder the burden of leadership in the church.The church has no paid clergy; instead all the adult males belong to one
of two priesthoods and are expected to lead worship, perform sacraments, and
provide unpaid service to the church as requested throughout their lives.The church structure and organization is similar to the fraternal
mutual-aid organizations that grew and flourished in the nineteenth century.This is not remarkable.Joseph
Smiths father was a Mason, and the church leaders in its early years were
almost all Masons.They naturally
used methods of governance that they understood and already knew how to use.

The growth of the Mormons has been rapid and
steady.Starting from Joseph
Smiths holy family of 23 in the 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints grew by the end of the nineteenth century to over 200,000
adherents, an average annual growth of 17 percent.A century later, it had about ten million members.

Of course, all this was merely bagatelle.More than the nineteenth century, it was the twentieth century was the
great age of popular religion.In
1906 a Christian sect was founded in Los Angeles, California, that grew to half
a billion worldwide by the turn of the twenty-first century.

In any century popular religion, its colorful leaders and
its millions of adherents, is a world outside the interest of our modern elites.The reason is not difficult to discover.People engage with popular religion as part of a self-governed struggle
to achieve a competence and respectability in the city, to negotiate the
transition from country ways to city ways.To the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century,
its earnestness and its enthusiasm is slightly embarrassing and shameful, its
reverence for the family and its dutiful roles is confining, and its experience
of salvation from sin inexplicable.But
as this same religion flourishes in the favelas of Latin America, in the chaotic
nations of southern Africa, and in the burgeoning giants of East Asia, the
observer is bound to admit that there is something between enthusiastic
Christianity and emerging capitalism that makes them eager partners.

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.Francis Fukuyama, Trust

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense. Lord Salisbury, Letter to Lord Lytton